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| Salford City Council Selects RSA's enVision Platform | |
| Posted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 02:45:00 PM | |
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RSA, The Security Division of EMC (NYSE: EMC), today announced that Salford City Council has selected the RSA enVision® platform to help meet Government Connect Secure Extranet (GCSX) Code of Connection (CoCo) compliance requirements. Salford City Council can now offer employees direct, secure communication with other local authorities, central government departments and national bodies via the GCSX wide area network. In addition, the RSA enVision solution provides Salford City Council with greater visibility of its network performance, user behavior and infrastructure, helping enable the city to streamline IT operations and improve overall security. The City of Salford is a local government district of Greater Manchester, England, with the status of city and metropolitan borough. It has a population of 218,000. Salford City Council exists to serve the residents of Salford and delivers a vast range of public services funded through both residents' council tax and government grants. Joe Whiteley, ICT Infrastructure Specialist at Salford City Council, said: "Before GCSX access could be granted, we needed to show that we were fully compliant with the GCSX CoCo - a list of security controls that apply to all local authorities taking either a direct connection to the GCSX, or who are connecting via an aggregated gateway. One of these security controls is to have in place an effective security information and event management solution (SIEM) that records instances of employees using the GCSX to access government data, as well as further detail about the data being accessed and ways in which it is being used." The RSA enVision platform helps enable Salford City Council to meet these requirements. RSA enVision technology offers a solution engineered to collect and analyze large amounts of data in real-time, from any event source and in computing environments of any size. Easily scalable, it is designed to eliminate the need for filtering and does not require agents to be deployed. The RSA enVision solution offers more than 1,400 reports tailored to help meet today's specific compliance requirements. "By centralizing management and storage of log files for up to six months, RSA enVision technology helped us meet GCSX CoCo compliance status in a matter of days," confirmed Whiteley. "We also have a greater understanding of our network performance thanks to the automated collection and analysis of logs from all parts of the network including firewalls, VPN connections, Microsoft® Windows® Server Active Directory® directory service, webmail servers and servers hosting our virtual machine infrastructure. That helps us to reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot." To solve issues, such as broken wireless connectivity or failed system log-on, Salford City Council IT department previously had to separately analyze four or five different device logs to work out what was causing the problem. RSA enVision technology is engineered to offer one management interface that simultaneously displays logs from multiple devices, meaning it can identify troublespots almost instantly. Discussing Salford City Council's reasons for choosing technology from RSA, Whiteley said: "Prior to deploying the RSA enVision solution we relied on a competitor SIEM solution. However, since it could not cope with the number of logs being generated it was unstable and prone to failure. Since CoCo requires all access attempts to the GCSX to be recorded, this was unacceptable to the City Council from a compliance perspective. We have worked with EMC for a number of years so we know firsthand that its products and pre- and post-sales support are second to none. By choosing a solution from RSA we knew there would be no issues." "Salford City Council is seen as an innovator within local government, particularly with regard to technology," said Tom Corn, Vice President of Product Marketing at RSA, The Security Division of EMC. "It was one of the first councils to utilize RSA enVision technology, alongside adopting employee authentication services (EAS), to help meet the requirements of GCSX CoCo compliance. Providing insight into three key areas, our RSA enVision platform is the ideal solution for organizations facing complex compliance requirements, while also offering a real-time view of risks and threats for security operations, and greater visibility for optimizing IT and network operations." |